The leading cause of accidental death in U.S. is drug abuse. Over one hundred people die daily from opioid-related drug overdoses in the U.S. alone. A total of 42,249 people died from overdosing on opioids in 2017 alone. In addition, over two million Americans are currently struggling with opioid dependency and 11.4 million Americans misused prescription opioids. In addition, many of these medications find their way into the environment and drinking water.
The source of many of these drugs come from prescription drugs that were used by those other than the patient for whom they were intended. Often unused medications are left in drawers or medicine cabinets, or just discarded in trash bins. Some are flushed down toilets.
There is no current method of safe disposal that is environmentally safe and completely denatures controlled substances at home or in hospitals. Moreover, diversion of opioid-related drugs among healthcare professionals is a growing problem. Among health care providers, 15% of pharmacists, 10% of nurses, and 8% of physicians may have either alcohol dependency or drug dependency of both.
An effective way to dispose of unwanted or unused medications would help to avoid those medications from being abused. There are a number of commercial products that purport to degrade these medications, such as Rx Destroyer™, Drug Buster™, Narc-X™, Pill Terminator™, Element MDS™, Cactus Smart Sink™, Mallinckrodt MDS™, Pill Catcher™, Stericycle™, and the like. However, while many of these products offer some ability to degrade controlled substances, none of them provide a universal solution and very few are able to reach close to 100% degradation of any controlled substances, much less most or all controlled substances.
Consequently there is still a very large unmet need for an effective way to generally degrade controlled substances, and, ideally, universally degrade controlled substances.